Conceptions of God as being omnipotent, even in a limited sense, include an assertion that God is also omniscient, not only knowing all that was but all that will be. Predestination in the classical Christian and especially Calvinist understandings include an understanding of this complete omniscience. But certain work in quantum physics is making this seem less defensible than it once was.

Omniscience in any traditional sense requires God to know the position, velocity, and spin of every particle and the properties of every wave in the universe at all times. The discovery of the now well-known “observer effect” through the double slit experiment shows that the presence or absence of an observer changes the behavior of a particle. In the experiment a series of particles (photons, electrons, atoms, even certain molecules) are fired at a screen one at a time with a barrier with two vertical slits between the source of the particles and the screen. When light or any other wave passes through such a barrier the interference of the waves creates a series of vertical lines on the screen. When particles are shot one at a time through the same double-slit barrier they should form two lines, as they are not interacting with other particles.

But the experiment finds that particles shot one at a time still behave as if they were interacting waves. When experimenters try to observe how the individual particles are behaving, they create a double-slit pattern like they should once again. When the particles are not observed, they act like waves again. The mere presence of an observer changes their behavior from that of a particle to that of a wave.

If God were always observing all particles, such a result would not be possible. God’s omnipotence would mean that the particles would never be unobserved and therefore would always behave as particles and never as waves. But as in the experiment and throughout the universe, particles behave as waves all the time. It therefore follows that God could not be observing every particle at every time, and therefore does not have unqualified omniscience.

A possible counterargument is that God could know the properties of the particles/waves in the double-slit experiment without observing them. This would imply, however, that God’s knowledge springs into existence with no relationship to the matter it describes, like a kind of “quantum esp.” It asserts that God does not observe the universe, he just happens to have intelligence that matches the universe exactly.

Research on the observer effect is still limited and it may be that we will find that only certain ways of knowing the behavior of the particle change its behavior or we may find that knowing the behavior of the particle at all is sufficient to change its behavior. So we may see in the future this new research in quantum physics shed light on certain aspects of the nature of God himself.

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Written July 2019